The plan, what they call “Future 2.0” is being offered as an effort to measure social media trends. To get the plan, customers must connect their RingPlus account with their Facebook account. RingPlus plans to offer Facebook integration features in the future, and is offering this much-larger free plan in exchange for customers taking the effort to connect their Facebook account to RingPlus.

The free plan much more closely mirror’s FreedomPop’s standard BYOD free plan. FreedomPop offers 200 minutes, 500 texts, and 500MB per month. This is the first plan that RingPlus has offered which trumps that plan.

RingPlus is generally preferred over FreedomPop, despite typically having worse plans, for a couple of reasons. One, it does not rely on VoIP coverage. FreedomPop’s free plans require a VoIP dialer app integration – which forces calls onto VoIP, unless the customer opts-in to a $29.99/year add-on that allows the use of Sprint CDMA voice coverage.

And two, device support. Because of FreedomPop’s VoIP reliance, it has to approve each Sprint BYOD device one-by-one. RingPlus however, can use the vast majority of CDMA and LTE phones on its free plans, dating back to 2001. PhoneNews.com has successfully activated phones dating back to the Sony Ericsson T608 – a phone our site cut its teeth on, and was credited with saving from a burn pile in Malaysia. Today it works for voice and text, and with some effort, WAP page browsing, using RingPlus’s free service.

There is one major caveat to the RingPlus Future 2.0 plan, and that’s mandatory overages. On most RingPlus plans, once your prepaid account balance is used up – the account simply stops being able to use more voice/text/data, once that particular bucket is used up. A user can then add money to their prepaid balance for overages, change plans, or purchase an overage bucket.

With the Future 2.0 plan however, you must maintain a linked credit card, and every time you go over, your credit/debit card will be charged in increments of $5 for any overages. That poses a potential peril, particularly for data overages, that most plans in America no longer have. With the Future 2.0 plan, if not careful, it is possible to rack up thousands in overages. RingPlus does not offer any form of account setting to stop an account from going over in data use.

The RingPlus Future 2.0 plan will be available on my.ringplus.net to existing customers starting at 9PM Pacific tonight, for a limited number of customers. Existing customers are encouraged to log in early and connect their accounts to Facebook now, as those customers will be most likely to be able to lock in one of the limited number of plans being given out.

PhoneNews.com Staff articles are typically in-depth articles. These are articles that involve multiple, and at times, several staff members who each contribute to the hard-hitting coverage that we deliver here.

Late this morning, they extended the offer to new people as well. You have to re-tweet a blog post – with Twitter, not Facebook. Odd their mixing two social networks for two overlapping offers, at the same time. Talk about confusion…